Editorial: Revised cocaine sentencing law should be retroactive

Associated Press photoAttorney General Eric Holder testifies before the U.S. Sentencing Commission Wednesday at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington. At right is Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons Thomas R. Kane.

Our nation’s attorney general understands the ravages of drug abuse. He knows the damages done to people, their families, their communities. As a prosecutor, Eric Holder worked to put drug offenders behind bars.

Holder also knows something about basic fairness. He understands that the law, if it is to command moral authority with the citizens, cannot appear to be arbitrary, capricious, favoring one group even as it targets another.

Since the 1980s, the law had been doing exactly that when it came to sentences for people convicted of crimes involving cocaine in its two basic forms: the solid, rock-like substance known as crack, and the drug refined to a powder. They are the same drug, products of the same plant, but you wouldn’t have known that to have read the frequent and hysterical news accounts back in the 1980s.

Back then, crack was blamed for anything and everything bad. Something had to be done. So Congress responded, hastily rewriting the laws. The new sentencing rules treated crack cocaine as literally 100 times worse than the same drug in its powdered form. The law required a minimum sentence of five years for someone convicted of possessing a mere 5 grams of crack cocaine; it took 500 grams of powder – well over a pound – to get the same sentence.

Congress finally and wisely came to its senses last year and amended the rules. Now, Holder wants to apply the new law retroactively – but only to those who deserve it. Those with long criminal histories would be excluded. So too would people who used a gun in committing a crime. But others, those who were just caught up in the math, would have their cases reassessed.

This is wise, fair, thoughtful. Which is not to suggest that some won’t argue otherwise. But their assertions, like the disproportionate sentences given to crack offenders, will be baseless.